Ontography

In recent years, the term »ontography« has been re-discovered across various disciplines, in a number of contexts ranging from geography to literature, phenomenology to object-oriented ontology, and media philosophy. Denominating various forms of recording of and access to ontic reality without the mediation by language or consciousness, the term encompasses different kinds of medial processes and operations of tracing and registering the Real. So, ontography is at the same time a concept, a procedure and a way of existence. Of the many operations that set up and maintain existence and call things into being, ontography centers on graphic operations, more precisely: the cultural techniques of designing, drawing, sketching and recording, of writing, of listing, of diagrammatics, and other techno-aesthetic graphics such as photography, cinematography, radiography. In contrast to other techniques, ontography has a special proximity to utensils and instruments, to the techniques and technologies of drawing and registering, to the tools of painting and writing ranging from the stick in the sand to high-tech imaging tools.
However, unlike in traditional ontology, ontography does not prioritize or privilege in any way verbal writing and language in general. On the one hand, the very procedures that—as part of ontic reality—record or »write« the respective being can be qualified as ontographic. On the other hand, also the special mode of being of those entities whose reality consists precisely of the fact that they carry out the operations of recording, or of depicting, or registering is ontographic. Drawing is ontographical, on the one hand, because it registers something and, on the other hand, because it consists in itself only of that very process of registering. And thirdly, both sides of ontography feed back to each other as what is recorded or drawn is precisely the transcript of the process of the recording or drawing itself.
For media and cultural research the concept of ontography in its current state of development is hardly more than a suggestion meant to inspire further elaboration; as such it holds a whole series of challenges in store. The first is to determine the scope of the term: Which ontological operations and procedures should be comprehended as non-ontographic and how do they relate to ontography? How can we distinguish ontography more clearly from self-reference, from mere autopoiesis, from related forms of recursion, feedback, and re-entry? What is gained when more traditional medial operations such as mimesis, representation, or transmission are rendered readable as ontographies? Can the ontographic mode be defined especially as a medially grounded mode of existence in the sense of Latour’s canon of modes of existence? And finally, one can expect that further analyses will expand and consolidate the heuristic value of the concept. Hopefully the processing and answering of these questions will further the insight into the possibilities and conditions of an operative ontology.

Abstracts

In 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, the famous architect Richard Neutra was commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico to build hospitals and schools. In response, he produced a number of prototypes and processes investigating different ways to ventilate and climate control buildings in the sub-tropical environment of the island through technology. Neutra famously labeled his work in Puerto Rico a Planetary Test. This article examines this history of making climate a medium for design and the implications of these practices for our present.

I explore two walks, one by Henry Thoreau on a hot day in 1851 and one by a line as it winds its way into a doodle today. Walks, I contend, generate circuits of energies and affects, some issuing from people, some from elsewhere. The goal is to accent how ahuman energies and affects inscribe themselves upon selves and inflect their positions and dispositions. Borrowing a term from Lorenz Engell, I call this inscriptive inflection an ›ontographic‹ procedure. Ontography will mark the operations of a creative cosmos, of a more-than-human world continuously impressing itself upon us. At the end, I leave the ontographic to return to the linguistic, to human attempts to ›write up‹ the ahuman ontographies they experience.

Sébastien Blanc
Write, neverendingly. Ontography in Merleau-Ponty

Rather than distinguish a phenomenological moment from an ontological moment in Merleau-Ponty’s work, this article aims to recapture its unity by questioning a metaphor that traverses it: that of the writing, the text or the trace. Ontography is the name of a problem and a paradox that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy bears and assumes: what good is it to say the Being, if it is already written, if every word breaks the silent contact it demands of us? To write is to prolong and reveal a captive meaning in things.

Till A. Heilmann
Ontology and Ontography in Digital Imaging

Ontography is intended to represent the epistemological counterpart to the ancestral ontology as well as the genuine functioning of certain media technologies. Using the media technology of digital imaging and processing as an example, the paper discusses the problem of a simple distinction between ontological and ontographic procedures.

Michael Lynch
Ontography as the Study of Locally Organized Ontologies

Ontography is distinguished from ontology in the way it pursues historical or ethnographic case studies, rather than general philosophical reflections on the nature of being. Ontography takes classical metaphysical problems, such as how to distinguish between natural entities and human technologies, but instead of offering a general solution to those problems it describes how socially, historically, and institutionally situated agents address and provisionally resolve those problems. Examples of such investigations are practical efforts to resolve the difference between research artifacts and evidence of microscopical entities in laboratory research, and cases in intellectual property law which deploy a distinction between products of nature and compositions of matter.

Michael Stadler
Re-Drawing the Lines of Reality: The Ontography of Reversible Gestalts

The notion of ontography is characterizable as open-source, both due to its collaborative development, its heterogeneous backgrounds and its broad applicability. In my paper, I concretize these open-source aspects of ontogra
phy firstly by redefining it with reference to E. Winkler’s dialogue Die Erkundung der Linie and secondly by applying it to the Gestalttheo retical topics of figure-ground reversals and bidirectional part-whole relations.

In a number of recent philosophical works, the concept of ontography has been raised to involve a revaluation of figurative and visual thinking against logico-conceptual thinking—i. e. a revaluation of a philosophical practice that supplements or departs from the traditional site of philosophy, language. This paper investigates the ontographic dimensions of Charles S. Peirce’s diagrammatology by focusing on his system of »existential graphs« as ontography avant la lettre.